classic architecturehttp://www.livingchurch.org/taxonomy/term/664/all
enThe Shackles of the Presenthttp://www.livingchurch.org/shackles-present
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Review by Matthew Alderman</p>
<p>A lesson from the book of Unintended Consequences. Some years ago, a cathedral underwent a renovation in which all the pews were removed, the reredos ripped out and replaced with a little table in the nave, and a large synthronon with bishop’s throne placed in the center of the apse. Much of the colorful wall decoration was painted over in tasteful beige, though some of those in the apse, above the chair, were spared. It included the inscription: “Blessing and honor and glory and power be unto Him that sits upon the throne and to the Lamb forever and ever.” The throne mentioned is not the seat of the inadvertently deified bishop, but the old high altar, now gone.</p>
<table align="right" border="2" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" style="width:250px;"><tbody><tr><td><a href="http://www.canterburypress.co.uk/books/9781848250307/art-of-tentmaking">The Art of Tentmaking</a><br /><a href="http://www.canterburypress.co.uk/books/9781848250307/art-of-tentmaking">Making Space for Worship</a><br />Edited by Stephen Burns.<br />Canterbury Press Norwich. Pp. 208. $45</td>
</tr></tbody></table><p>The church is <a href="http://www.philadelphiacathedral.org/">Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral</a>, and the progenitor of this makeover was its former dean, Richard Giles, celebrated in <em>The Art of Tentmaking</em>. In the introductory essay, “Secure the Stakes,” Roman Catholic liturgical renovator Richard S. Vosko comments that the church building “is not, per se, the place where God dwells. Rather, it is a meeting house where the community engages with God and one another.” As a young Roman Catholic, it pains me to watch Anglicans adopt the buzzwords that made my childhood Masses so stale and colorless. Even for those my age who may be less “spikey” in their liturgical tastes, modern church architecture seems barren and lifeless. The young want the “[s]teeples, stained-glass windows, and religious imagery” derided here, in addition to the “hospitality, outreach, education, and small prayer groups” beloved of contemporary church folk. But it is precisely in the ostensibly new, “open,” “big-tent” spaces that one feels the dead hand of the past, circa 1968.</p>
<p>There is still much to like. Giles and his cohorts display a degree of culture and sensitivity often lacking in similar polemics on my side of the Tiber. Martyn Percy’s “Pitching Tents: Some Interpretive Sketches on Sacred Space” praises the humanity found in public squares and offers an enticing vision of Benedictine-style hospitality (Giles began his career as an urban planner), while Stephen Cottrell’s “Richard Giles, Tentmaker by Divine Appointment,” starts off with bold words from the dean that might embarrass some churchgoers today: “We gather because we worship God.” Those of us who find the static chattiness of most modern worship trying can cheer at Giles’s reminder that ceremonial, movement, and ritual are frequently just as important as the prayers themselves.</p>
<p><img alt="" src="/sites/default/files/Tentmaking%20display.jpg" style="width: 248px; height: 400px; float: left;" />Yet, even more can be found that is troubling. Percy praises <a href="http://www.stpauls.co.uk/">St. Paul’s Cathedral</a> in London for its non-divisive “common space” in terms that imply not the bright specificity of St. John’s heavenly Jerusalem, but a luminous vagueness: “clean, uncontroversial, tidy, and neat.” Cottrell’s glowing description of one of Giles’s earlier parishes, austere and “breathtakingly beautiful,” sounds on reflection little more than an empty box: “a place where things happened. A place to be occupied.” Ron Pattenden’s “Worship with Eyes Open,” on religious imagery, is illustrated by three pieces of art: one borderline blasphemous, one incomprehensibly au courant, and one abstract. A reader will hunt hard for a recognizable theology of the Mass, or even the Lord’s Supper in the Reformed sense, with the possible exception of “Life Passages for Faith,” which touches it only slightly, and “The Scandalous Table,” which begins with a description of <a href="http://www.saintgregorys.org/">St. Gregory of Nyssa Church</a> in San Francisco, a truly singular liturgico-architectural space, and focuses mostly on open Communion.</p>
<p>There is little to suggest liturgy is something handed down, giving continuity and order to worship and life.</p>
<p>We interrogate liturgical custom as to “why we have ended up doing things the way we do” with the goal of changing the Church rather than appreciating the strata of built-up tradition. Yet, for all the praise of Dean Giles’s work as prophetic, so many of the spaces that he has inspired seem comfortably, fashionably minimalist, challenging in only the way the age would like to be challenged. A century or so ago, by comparison, the Ritualists were fighting to turn the plain meeting house back into something redolent of the house of God, even, in some cases, to the point of facing jail time. Incense, vestments, and Christmas carols — all the old pomp — were dangerous and daring. Many Roman Catholic liturgical scholars, such as Uwe Michael Lang and Alcuin Reid, are now seeing as treasure what <em>The Art of Tentmaking</em> derides as so many accretions, “the shackles of the past.” Clearing churches of seemingly pointless clutter not only throws the baby out with the font water but endangers the altar and Lamb as well.</p>
<p>One wonders what Dean Giles would make of the liturgy that a group of Harvard undergrads recently helped arrange in the space-age <a href="http://www.archdaily.com/112682/ad-classics-mit-chapel-eero-saarinen/">MIT Chapel</a>, the first solemn high Latin Mass there since the 1960s. The church was packed with the young and the curious, and it was not the worship, but the architecture, that felt out of date. Here endeth the lesson.</p>
<p><em>Matthew Alderman is a project architect at <a href="http://cramandferguson.com">Cram and Ferguson Architects</a> of Concord, Massachusetts. His work as an artist, designer, and illustrator appears at <a href="http://matthewalderman.com">matthewalderman.com</a>.</em></p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/book-review" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">book review</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/church-architecture" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">church architecture</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/classic-architecture" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">classic architecture</a></div><div class="field-item odd" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/philadelphia-episcopal-cathedral" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Philadelphia Episcopal Cathedral</a></div><div class="field-item even" rel="dc:subject"><a href="/mit-chapel" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">MIT Chapel</a></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-categories-top field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Categories:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/lead-story" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Lead Story</a></div><div class="field-item odd"><a href="/essays-reviews" typeof="skos:Concept" property="rdfs:label skos:prefLabel" datatype="">Essays &amp; Reviews</a></div></div></div>Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:59:22 +0000Web Editor1650 at http://www.livingchurch.orgLight in Detroithttp://www.livingchurch.org/light-detroit
<div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even" property="content:encoded"><p>Detroit’s Historic Houses of Worship<br />Compiled by <strong>Maria O. Collum</strong>, <strong>Barbara E. Kruger</strong>, and <strong>Dorothy Kostuch</strong>. Photographs by <strong>Dirk Bakker</strong>.<br /><a href="http://wsupress.wayne.edu/books/1036/Detroits-Historic-Places-of-Worship">Wayne State University Press</a>. Pp. 256. $39.95</p>
<p>Review by Matthew Alderman</p>
<p>Books on local history, especially local church history, are a bit like local museums. You might stumble across a little-known but well-curated collection, holding such forgotten gems as the lantern from the night of Paul Revere’s ride. Or you may be confronted with a puzzling hodgepodge of the decontextualized and ephemeral — a diorama of a giant prehistoric armadillo, an international collection of hats someone gave President Eisenhower, a glass soda bottle of uncertain provenance, or Anwar Sadat’s Fearless Leader-ish dress uniform. Fortunately, there are no giant armadillos, real or metaphorical, to be found in this illuminating new volume from Wayne State University Press.</p>
<p><em>Detroit’s Historic Houses of Worship</em>, the most comprehensive chronicle of the city’s historic churches, has been 20 years in the making, and all that time and work shows. Built around a broad selection of churches of numerous denominations, two cathedrals and a synagogue, 37 in all, it presents their detailed histories, both architectural and social, within the larger civic context, as well as treating the reader to page after page of dazzling full-color photography from Dirk Bakker. Instead of the operatic decay portrayed by another recent work, <em>The Ruins of Detroit</em>, we encounter soaring interiors lit with stained glass like the German hall-church of St. Joseph’s, its baby-blue ceiling studded with gilt stars. Despite the somewhat sorrowful note struck obliquely in the preface, which comments on the “significant change” Detroit’s urban landscape has undergone, it is startling to find the heart of the city so full of beauty and life. One might be looking at an entirely different city.</p>
<p>Compiling such a work requires considerable dexterity and balance. Every house of worship profiled has something to delight both the armchair historian and the aesthete. Sainte Anne, the Mother Church of Detroit, is handsome enough, but its 19th-century brickwork conceals a history going back to Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac and French fur-trading days, making it the second-oldest continuously active Roman Catholic church in the United States. Closer to our own time, we encounter people like the anonymous black freedmen and -women who founded Second Baptist Church, the mother of 30 other local congregations, or like the Rev. Richard W. Ingalls (1926-2006), who rang the bell of the Mariners’ Church downtown to mark the sinking of the <em>Edmund Fitzgerald</em> in 1975. Helpful appendices on the architects, artists, and craftsmen give further background. While all the structures have an important role in the architectural history of Detroit, several have deeper significance.</p>
<p>Two works by master Boston church builder Ralph Adams Cram (1863-1942), the Cathedral Church of St. Paul and St. Florian’s Roman Catholic Church in Hamtramck, are prominently showcased. Cram revolutionized liturgical taste at the start of the last century, transforming America’s vision of church architecture from Puritan New England clapboard to stone-walled Gothic. (I must admit a certain bias here, as I work for the architectural firm founded by Cram in 1889, which still builds in the traditional styles he popularized.) The inclusion of these works not only ties the world of Detroit’s churches to larger artistic and theological trends but also illustrates an architect’s versatility over time. St. Paul’s, finished in 1911, is crisp, English, austerely beautiful, and not without a touch of robust muscularity. St. Florian’s, dedicated in 1928, almost two decades later, is broader in its inspirations, luminous, vivid and equally stunning in a very different way. Cram’s influence can also be detected in the Art Deco-tinged Little Rock Missionary Church and the more straightforward Jefferson Avenue Presbyterian Church and St. Matthew and St. Joseph Episcopal Church.</p>
<p>Even the more obscure entries are beautiful, or at least endearingly quirky, like the lavish, mosaic-decorated three-decker interior of Saint Aloysius Church, local architect Walter R. Meier’s clever (and, to my knowledge, unique) response to an unusually cramped site. There is also Our Lady of the Rosary with its gilt pyramidal roof atop a crenellated, castle-like campanile; the serene green-blue interior of First Presbyterian Church; and the zebra-stripe brick and stone of Most Holy Redeemer, a sort of pup Westminster Cathedral.</p>
<p>The book achieves an ecumenical breadth without losing focus. There are cavernous Roman Catholic immigrant churches, ceilings studded with Gothic ribs and antique lightbulbs (and in the case of one Hungarian parish, ceiling fans), a sober takeoff on the Pantheon designed as a synagogue, and a number of worthy entries from denominations whose architectural contributions are often un­justly overlooked, like Historic Trinity Lutheran Church, a 1931 Gothic jewel box with a trussed wooden ceiling of exquisite color and detail.</p>
<p>Like the churches it chronicles, the book is itself a monument of sorts. It is dedicated to Dr. Kostuch, one of the coauthors, who passed away in 2005. Her work is in turn based on research begun by Lucy Hamilton, coauthor of <em>Discovering Stained Glass in Detroit</em>, who died in 1996. However glowing its illustrations, a touch of poignant memorial pervades its text. The book is a work of preservation as well as celebration. John Gallagher comments in the foreword that “We live in a more secular age now, and the old saying ‘they don’t make them like that anymore’ has never seemed more apt,” though he also notes that the glorious old churches of years past are filled with “loving details,” woodwork and stained glass, that remind us that “we can tell a people by what they spend their money on …. No one can visit these churches and not grasp the profound importance that worship held in their builders’ lives.” But beauty never dies. Even amid the so-called “ruins of Detroit” a light still burns, and I invite you to read this book not merely as a tribute to past faith but as an inspiration for the future.</p>
<p><em>Matthew Alderman lives in Concord, Massachusetts, where he works at <a href="http://www.cramandferguson.com/">Cram and Ferguson Architects</a>. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame’s classical design program, he frequently lectures and writes on ecclesiastical architecture.</em></p>
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